The inevitable future of self-driving cars

🚗 Hello and welcome back
Issue #246: wildfires, knives, and lesser-known reading recs

Late last year, I was visiting one of my favorite places on Earth: Dolores Park in San Francisco at golden hour. It was starting to get cold and the sky was turning purple, which meant I’d need a ride home. “You have to take a Waymo,” one of my friends said, referring to a brand of self-driving car. “You can’t visit SF without doing that at least once.”

Five minutes later, a signature white Jaguar pulled up… and drove right past me. The same thing happened to

Chris Yanda

on Medium, who chased his Waymo around a corner when it got confused. Mine stopped 10 feet away, down a hill. I got in, listened to the prerecorded instructions (fasten my seatbelt, don’t touch the steering wheel, stay calm) and we were off.

It felt like a very slow version of the tilt-a-whirl at Dorney Park — but I arrived safely at my destination. (There was a kerfuffle right after I got out, when the Jaguar backed up to turn around, almost hitting me, but besides that it was uneventful.)

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week, the largest exhibitions featured self-driving cars. Manufacturers like Waymo (the leader in this space, owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet) and upstart competitors like Zoox (owned by Amazon) were gearing up for what they’re hoping is an inflection point in self-driving technology. Since last spring, anyone has been able to hail robotaxis in San Francisco. They’re already ferrying passengers around LA, Phoenix, Miami, and Austin. This year, they’ll do the same in Tokyo. The rollout has been bumpy — a car drove one person in endless circles, some honk at each other all night, and the safety implications are still unclear — but, personally, when I was sitting in that car the main thing I felt was inevitability.

Vincent Vanhoucke

, an engineer at Waymo, writes: “Within the first couple of rides, as the novelty inevitably fades, you’re left with a deep sense that this is how personal transport ought to be.” I didn’t reach that point, but if you’ve ever been in a self-driving car… did you?

As with any new technology, what’s most interesting aren’t the first-order effects but the unintended second- and third-order ones. Also on Medium,

Nicholas Moryl

peers into the future, imagining cars that may get radically smaller when they no longer need steering wheels or brakes. And maybe, 100 years from now, “humans driving cars will be like humans riding horses: rare, expensive, and mostly done for fun in dedicated spaces.”

—

Harris Sockel

🔪 Also today

• 17 years ago, one writer and her family lost their home in San Diego’s Witch Creek Fire. On Medium, in one of the most moving and insightful stories about home loss I’ve ever read, she explains: “Being part of a mass wildfire draws in a lot of opinions on your grief… You feel the need to caveat that you know a home is just ‘stuff’ and a life is not replaceable, but it really isn’t just stuff. It is… the story of your life.”
• Poet and essayist
  Elisa Gabbert
  — who just released a new book — has shared exhaustive reading lists on Medium every year for the last decade. This year’s list features under-the-radar titles like Manuel Puig’s Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1982), a novel written almost entirely in dialogue, and Mollie Panter-Downes’ One Fine Day (1947) which is literally just the story of one uneventful day. I love the honesty in these reviews. Gabbert isn’t trying to sell you anything, and she’s one of the most adventurous readers I know.
• Don’t buy a knife set. Just buy one great chef’s knife.
  Mark Laflamme
  , who wasted $2,000 in his quest for cutlery perfection, recommends the Victorinox 9-inch Fibrox Pro Chef’s Knife. It’s $60.

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